Friday, August 11, 2017

Scribes of the Cairo Geniza Crowdsource Project

The purpose of phase I of Scribes of the Cairo Geniza is to sort
Cairo Geniza fragments in order to prepare them for transcription in
phase II (launching Spring 2018). In this phase, you will sort fragments
into different categories based on their script types: whether they are
written in Hebrew or Arabic scripts and formal or informal scripts, and
whether they contain specific visual characteristics.

This information offers clues to the type of text a fragment
contains. Having this information for the entire corpus will allow us to
sort the fragments into workflows for the transcription tasks in phase
II. For more on the characteristics you’ll be looking for and what they
can tell us, see the Field Guide.

The results from Scribes of the Cairo Geniza have the potential to
rewrite the history of the premodern Middle East, Mediterranean and
Indian Ocean trade, and the Jewish diaspora. Until now, most of the
information has remained locked away in undeciphered manuscript
fragments; less than one-third of the 350,000 items have been catalogued
in the 120 years that the cache has been known to exist. Virtually all
scholars who have studied these texts have come away with a transformed
sense of the history of the region and the long ties of intimacy among
its people. Students and the general public will have the opportunity to
benefit from encountering these fragments online and from learning how
to sort and eventually transcribe them as members of this citizen
scientist community. We see this project as a way for people with shared
interests and different skill levels from around the world to meet in a
common endeavor and unlock this storage chamber of ancient fragments.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.